Which is a mistake, mistake, a lesson learned over years forgotten in one moment of unplanned action. A girl named Joy asks if we can smell something weird? I close my mouth and pretend it’s just the start of a story instead of the question it really is. No one answers, just shakes their heads, excited. Because none of them know me. They don’t know that stories don’t come from my mouth, my teeth, and this smell does.
And leaders with their muzzle-hands are never far behind.
Vickie, farthest from me, telling stories instead of asking questions, says the smell reminds her of her grandmère’s house, the stairs up to the attic, the sounds and scents and the model papier-mâché man that lived on a shelf and had scared the shit out of her for six long years. It had eyes. It would’ve scared me too.
The moon is bright, like a distant stranger’s flashlight shining against the side of the tent. Leah, a small girl with hair coiled up, says it’s probably just the lake, there’s a lake by her step-dad’s house in Maine that’s just visible from her bedroom window, with a boathouse by the edge that’s broken and beaten down and her mother had said that her step-father had said that it was old and never used and they weren’t ever to go there, it wasn’t safe, the whole lake wasn’t safe but especially the boathouse, except one afternoon when it was hot and the air was wet and full and the smell was just like the one in the tent now, the strange one now that doesn’t make sense, but somehow worse, she just needed to find out about the boathouse, and this new house, this new step-dad, she took her cell phone and she went out the back door and headed for the lake, the smell getting stronger and the air getting thicker, she’d had to open her mouth to breathe, the lake was green and the grass was tall and bit into her legs, the boathouse had no windows, and she was steps away and her eyes were burning and—
Did you hear that? I ask. Maybe there was no sound before, but there are definitely sounds now, sliding bodies and water bottles and annoyed huffs and that’s fine, I don’t mind. Kelsey nudges Leah and says So? and Leah shrugs, spreading the corner of her sleeping bag to fill the empty spaces on the floor. Nothing, Leah says, so nothing. My step-dad came around the back and we went out for ice cream. And then I had to pack for here.
Joy says Whoa under her breath and stretches out her stick-thin legs, her flashlight wild in her hands. Joy’s fingers clutch closed like dead things when she hunches forward, shoulder blades like beetle shells and tells us that she thinks the smell might be the bear, she’s never seen a bear or smelled one, so maybe it’s come for us from across the lake, maybe it sensed our food and then smelled us and maybe now it’s right outside, you guys, right?
We’re silent, listening, smelling the air and my mouth is shut, I lock dry lips, my tongue catalogues forgotten food. Meat for now, meat for later, never hungry until I have to be, a background hum until Vickie shakes her head and says a bear wouldn’t care about us, not with the rest of the real food a hundred feet away. And we’re noisy and shit. Wild animals think humans are the worst, seriously. Vickie leans back, swinging her hair so the ponytail hits the tent wall even if her shoulders don’t, and that could be the end of it, it could, there are so many other ways to be a stranger among strangers, stories are the least of it, and I would say something but my mouth is very, very closed.
In the center of the tent, between everyone, Shauna digs her chin between bent knees and says Sometimes that’s not true. And it looks like maybe she’s going to tell her story, another story, but Kelsey rolls her eyes and drags her backpack a little closer to her pillow and interrupts the moment, breaks the buildup, says she’s not interested in any animal attack stories unless someone actually died.
Shauna looks at Kelsey’s feet, and in a voice that feels like hooks and awls she says Kelsey doesn’t know anything, so shut up. And Shauna’s breathing too hard, her chin pressed into her knees and her arms wrapped around her legs and in the shadows I can see her fingers digging moons into her wrists. She’s wearing socks, and tight thermals under her pajamas, and her hair is a long black stream that tangles at the ends.
The night began when the bear was coming, when the danger was the outside coming in, rather than what was inside waiting for us. That’s the difference between stories and the woods. Real danger comes from the inside.
It was easier for us when there was a common thing to fear. A bear is a simple thing to keep alive in the mind, on nights like this, the suggestion already there. A bear is a thing that is always coming closer.
I slide forward, bring the smell with me, and shush the air in the shadows beside Shauna’s head. She shivers. We need to be quiet, I say. I hear something. Over there.
The flashlights turn as bodies scramble as focus shifts and the wind makes the lake swallow in uneven rhythm. It’s Vickie who thinks to ask if we’re drawing its attention, and it’s Leah whose eyes are wide when she says we should turn our flashlights off.
I don’t hear anything.
Stop talking.
Shut up.
Turn them off.
The breath of six girls echoes, uncertain in a confined space. Someone—and that someone might be me—someone stretches, unwinding in the midnight tent until joints crack like branch snaps just outside the tent.
The others gasp and Kelsey, I think it’s Kelsey, says Fuck very quietly.
What, Vickie whispers, what is it, and in the faded lamp of moonlight Kelsey unzips the backpack by her pillow and I see stars inside it, barest flashes of light from twisted wrappers reflecting out into the tent, candy bars and chips and I didn’t think it mattered, okay. I just—I was going to share.
Leah’s voice is wind-soft and reedy, like a mother calling from a distant house. You have to get rid of it. It can smell that stuff in here. “It” the candy, “it” the bear, no one’s using words for the things that we know have names. Naming things makes them real.
Kelsey shoves the bag over, a plague ship that we scatter from. Some of us scatter from. I don’t. I have meat in my mouth. I have memories of food.
We could eat it, I say.
No, Joy says, too quickly, too strange and high, but the others whisper in the dark, kneeling closer, hands sliding haphazard over mine, taking food while my fingers only seem to catch the empty husks of those Kelsey had already eaten—until there’s nothing there, just my gnawed nails sifting through the wrappers and I have to bite my cheek to stop myself from grabbing the candy back again, act normal, act normal, I’m hungry, give it back—
Joy’s crying, little desperate gasps that she’s trying hard to muffle, panic and fear and who knows why, she has no words, the others are eating, eating, mouths churning food, and in the dark it sounds like the smack and gurgle and mastication of a beast that’s found where it stored away its rotting quarry. Joy covers her ears, whispers no, begins to rock, and the tent shakes, dead leaves on the forest floor rustle like fallen papers in time to the hurried mash of teeth and tongue. Vickie swears, puts her chocolate down, wraps her arms around Joy and starts humming dreams into her ear, lullabies and quiet words and susurrations as they rock together but slowly, slowing, slowed, and Joy’s still crying but they’re quiet tears now, and in the morning maybe a leader will take her aside to have a talk, ask some questions that Joy doesn’t have to answer, because strange things happen in dark tents, on camping trips, where the stories happen and the bear may or may not be on the other side of the lake.
My hand steals out and I pick up Vickie’s discarded chocolate. She can’t see me. It has to get eaten too. No one will know, and isn’t the best food the stolen food, the free food, the food that was another’s but has found a better home in me?
The smell of the half-eaten bar is rich and bright, a scent that supersedes all others. Sweet where meat once was, and with it I see a night of laughing with the others as we turn from stories to adventures, to travel, to schools and nighttime wonderings. Sweet, like a bear turning far from us, away and gone, the night turned safe and my mouth stretched normal.
I bite, I chew,
I close my eyes, tongue pressing the chocolate to the roof of my mouth, flattening it out there and letting the melted, stained saliva drain down, away.
It’s when I bite again that I feel the sharp, painful dig of a tiny shell against my teeth. A peanut that missed quality control, mixed in somehow with this batch of candy. I isolate the piece with the tip of my tongue, careful not to swallow, and I wipe my fingers against my mouth to catch it while no one looks. Shell, that’s all, and nothing else, and I bite again because I can.
And the pain comes back, two tiny pebbles too hard to break if I test them against some other teeth, not curved enough to be a shell, but perhaps a nut that overbaked, and I spit those against my fingertips as well, a small collection to keep and stare at later, much later, away from all these outside people and all their outside eyes.
With the third bite the meat comes back, all taste of sweetness cast away, the scent of stories stronger now, the feel of something fuller in my throat, because my teeth, my teeth, my teeth are crumbling, tiny rocks against my tongue, my hand is at my mouth again, spitting out the tiny broken bones. Vickie’s still holding Joy, but she turns her head to glare in my direction. Noises, so sorry Joy, so sorry Vickie, I close my fingers into my palm and press the shards into my skin. I run my tongue over the spots where the crumblings come from—have my teeth formed a new terrain? Are they gone entirely? Was the cracking just an unreal thing, unconfirmed until seen under lights and dissected in my bathroom mirror, forks and toothpicks testing what the muzzle holds back now? The chocolate has a deeper taste, and I smell smoke and teeth and—
“What’s in your hand?”
Kelsey. Has turned her flashlight onto me.
What are you doing?
Shut that off!
“No, look at Loni. What’s she doing over there?”
So many eyes.
And then I hear the bear. There really is a bear.
It breathes in aching wheezes. Its paws drag along the ground.
It tells me I have a choice, now, where there’s never been one before.
Is there any food left? I say, and the others stare at me, at my face that feels strange under Kelsey’s light. I hold up the chocolate in my hand and I try to smile. They don’t answer me. I say, I think this one’s gone bad.
The bear smells very close now.
My jaw feels strange, the muzzle gone. I never knew I wore a muzzle, one I held in place myself. My teeth, new teeth, carved to fit, slide seamlessly together.
The woods are dark. The lake is narrow. My mouth is wide, my mouth is teeth, my mouth is smoke and smell and blood and meat.
Loni, we should get a leader—
I unzip the door and let the bear in with us all.
© 2014 by Katherine Crighton.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katherine Crighton lives in Massachusetts. Her work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons, Flash Fiction Online, and other venues; she also coauthors urban fantasy under the name Anna Katherine. Connect with her on directly via Facebook at crightonkatherine or Twitter at @c_katherine.
To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.
It Feels Better Biting Down
Livia Llewellyn
Art by Reiko Murakami
“What’s with the lawnmower. No one mows this early in spring.”
“It’s June,” I reply. “Spring should be long gone.”
My twin sister rolls over onto her back, rubbing the afternoon sleep from her eyes with ten long, pale fingers and two long, pale thumbs. I’m lying next to her in our nest of pillows on the living room carpet, holding a book with hands that look just like hers, pale and strange, the extra finger curving into each palm, shy-like but not vestigial or immobile, not completely reticent. A sleeping stinger waiting to strike, my mother once said in her raspy, rye-tinged voice. We like that.
“Where is it coming from?”
“Neighbors,” I say. “Behind us. Not the sides.”
“I didn’t know someone new moved in.” Sister sits up. That’s what I call her anymore, and what she calls me. It drives our parents crazy because we only answer to Sister, and they never know which one they’re going to get when they call our name. It only started last summer, just before our senior year, but sometimes now I can’t even remember our original names. We are Sister, a singular entity with twenty long fingers at the ends of our four pale hands.
“I know.” I close the book and stare through the open-screened windows. Only the neighbor’s roof is visible, framed by wind-tossed trees swaying under a cream blue sky. “No one’s lived there for years. Remember Father complaining?”
“‘A white trash eyesore,’ he said.”
“‘Property rates dropping,’ he said.”
“All the plants dying,” Sister says.
“Too many pine needles, too little sun,” I say. “That whole backyard is dead. The last owners graveled it over like a parking lot.”
“What are they mowing then?” Sister asks.
The engine sputters and buzzes in a low, monotonous drone. The air pooling in through the open-screened windows smells of cut grass and gasoline. It smells enticing and new.
Sister stares at me, waiting for my response. I let the book slip from my hands. Mystery is blossoming behind the fence, waiting to be bit into like a stolen plum. We bare our teeth like wolves. We call it the delicious smile, because something strange and delicious is about to be found, to be torn apart and sucked dry. It’s another little thing that drives our parents insane, because it doesn’t look anything like a smile at all.
I’m always the first to move. My sister likes me to hang back a bit. I stand up and hold out my hand, and she reaches. I pull her to her feet with little effort on my part, our extra pinky fingers locked as she moves up toward me, a graceful pantomime of our violent birth. We make our way to through the silent house, hand in hand. Our parents are gone for the weekend, visiting friends, they said. They’re probably just hiding out in a local motel. Summers are hard for them because school is out and we’re always around. To be fair, we don’t make it easy. We never have, not since our unexpected birth. We’re not stupid; we know how they feel about us. We see them as one with two sets of eyes. They don’t like our indecipherable games, our private whisperings in secret languages, our twisty extra fingers brushing across their normal non-twisty things. Sometimes I feel bad. Only sometimes. They only ever wanted one of us to begin with, and anyway this is what twins are. Wrong. This is how we’re supposed to be.
By the time we get to the den and open the patio door, the mowing has stopped. A high-pitched fluting noise floods the air—it’s the wind washing through all the construction sites surrounding our block, playing with chain link fences, weaving through empty, honeycombed frames of houses and apartment buildings, and stiff forests of construction beams half-driven into the hard ground. The skeletal remains of what was to be a new neighborhood, abandoned to ruin almost as quickly as it had begun. As we step outside, I raise my hands. I feel the warmth of the day growing steady behind the cool gusts. In this part of the world it usually takes so long to throw off the winter cold, but this summer already feels different. We stand on the concrete slabs, looking across the yard at the fence. Father put it up a decade ago, when all the hedges started to wither and die off. In the slight gaps between each wide wooden slat, there’s no movement or sound. We wait.
“Nobody’s there,” I finally whisper. “Maybe it was next door after all.”
“I heard it, too.”
“It’s cold out. Let’s go back inside.”
Sister grabs a plastic lawn chair and walks across the grass. Irritated, I stand at the patio’s edge, toes curled over it and brushing the green blades as I watch. She places the lawn chair against the fence, then steps onto the fabric seat, pressing her face against the slats. Slowly she stands until her head peers over the top of the fence. Almost instantly, she crouches down, shock lighting up her face like the sun.
Come over here! she mouths, her hand beckoning. There’s a woman in the yard!
I casually pick up a chair, dragging it through the grass as if this was the most boring thing in the world. Of course I want to see, I wouldn’t dream of not seeing when Sister already has. I plunk the chair beside hers, and she shushes me, one long finger at her lips like she’s our mother. Like she came first. It’s times like this I want to grab her little fingers, snap them off her hands like beans from a vine.
What’s wrong with you, she whispers as I step onto the chair.
What’s wrong with you, I reply.
There’s a woman, she’s just standing there.
So what? Did you see a lawnmower?
No. Her face is all—Sister grimaces.
Is all what? I ask.
I can’t describe it. You’ve just got to see.
I don’t want her to see us.
She can’t, Sisters says. Believe me.
I hold out my hand. She clasps it, our stinger fingers coming together like a hook and eye. And just like that we’re in sync again, we’re Sister. In unison, we peer through the slats.
Behind the fence, a dark brown ranch house sits in the shade of several massive evergreens, their branches brushing the shingled roof. The surrounding yard is a carpet of pale gray gravel. No bushes or flowers, no potted plants or garden or fruit trees. A woman stands in the center of the yard, barefoot and wearing a shapeless green dress. The hem flutters in the wind, and her crooked brown hair floats about her shoulders, but she’s as still as the house. She faces the fence. She faces us.
I let out a small gasp.
I know, Sister replies.
Together, we stand up until we’re both staring over the top of the fence, our free hands clutching the rough wood for balance. The woman’s face is like a statue, with only smooth, flesh-colored indentations where her eyes should be. The nose is small and without nostrils—almost an afterthought. She has no eyebrows. Her mouth is her largest feature, wide with thin, sloppily painted purple lips that stretch across her cheeks almost to her small ears.
Nightmare Magazine Issue 25, Women Destroy Horror! Special Issue Page 7